


is it bright where you are? have the people changed?

by thermodynamicActivity (chlorinetrifluoride)



Series: The Collegestuck 'Verse [20]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Middle School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Disfigurement, Gen, Humanstuck, Isolation, Underage Drinking, allusions to eritav, one-sided cronus/latula
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-13
Updated: 2017-06-13
Packaged: 2018-11-13 16:04:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11188590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chlorinetrifluoride/pseuds/thermodynamicActivity
Summary: You're Eridan Ampora, and it's the fourth of July, and you and your brother are having friends over, and possibly a barbecue. You didn't even know your brother still /had/ friends, and you're sure this is going to be boring as hell. However, you're hoping a friend you haven't seen properly in ages will drop by. You're not holding your breath for this. You think she's trying to live out the rest of her life in her room.But life, sorta like the busted vending machine at your school, is full of surprises.And you will never abandon one of your closest friends.





	is it bright where you are? have the people changed?

**Author's Note:**

> this is probably going to be the 2nd to last calliope-centric fic from my binge writing session over the weekend.

**_July 2005 - Eridan Ampora_ **

It’s the fourth of July of 2005, and the school year is still two months away. If your mother wasn’t on deployment, and your father making business deals in Seoul, they’d be grilling hot dogs and burgers, drinking mimosas, complaining about the new purple streak in your hair - it looks fucking badass, okay? - and yelling at Cronus to stop being so lazy. He’s gotten a little better with that. 

A week ago, you crept downstairs, and saw him flushing the contents of several teeny-tiny ziplock baggies down the toilet.

Now, he’s all surly, sweaty, anxious, but nowhere near as sessile as he used to be. Apparently getting straight 65s in all his junior year classes, except for AP US (he got an 80) was the impetus he needed to stop being such a useless jerk.

Happy fucking birthday, America.

As it has been ever for ages, your brother’s a douche, your parents haven’t even texted you today, and your purple streak is growing out and fading. You’re going to have to buy more dye to refresh it.

Years later, you realize Cronus was mired in the eye of a hurricane, in the center of his depression and addiction, unable to do anything except alienate his practically nonexistent friends further. Okay, he could have chosen to be less of a jerk, but you’re not entirely sure he knew how to do that.

Latula’s the only one who checks on him nowadays, other than Rufioh, who is too kind to give up on anyone, and even Latula barely tolerates him.

Their latest fight had to do with him saying some offensive shit to/about her boyfriend while Cronus was high. For like the twenty-third time. Also, he was an asshole even when he was sober. Continues to be an asshole when he’s sober.

She still vaguely cares, though. The same way Calliope was your first real friend, Cronus was hers.

That’s why Cronus is like… shaving, and pretending like he didn’t spend all of last night being hammered as fuck. That and the fact that he wants to bang her.

“We inviting anyone over?” he asks you, checking his face in the bathroom mirror to see if he’s missed a hair.

He knows Latula and Rufioh are invited. Possibly Damara, if she decides to put down her bong. In terms of _your_ friends, Vriska’s having a better barbecue at her place, so - besides Aradia, who hates Serkets on principle - they’re probably all going there. 

Aside from the Megido sisters, the only person not going to Vriska’s is Her. The only Her you really want to see today. 

Not like Cronus and Latula, where Cronus is still infatuated by her. This Her is merely your best friend. Merely doesn’t cover it, though.   

She promised she would come, but she’s promised to hang out with you lots of times since her accident, canceled at the last minute, and refused to have company at her house.

She’s told you like she feels like the fucking Elephant Man and maybe she’ll get lucky, lie down, and die, just like him. In fact, she said that verbatim, F word and all, much to your shock. She doesn’t want anyone to gawk at her. 

And you didn’t understand the reference until you googled it.

Calliope getting over her self-imposed exile for long enough to walk to your house would be a miracle.

However, miracles do happen. They happen more often than you think, as a boy in face paint and torn sweatpants will inform you a few years from now.

The doorbell rings, and you’re the one to answer. Of course, it’s Latula, arm-in-arm with someone you’d recognize five trillion feet away. The lower half of the girl’s face has been covered with this gauzy, light green cloth that matches the belt around her waist. She wears an off-white cotton sundress, one that neglects to conceal the burns on her left shoulder and hand.

“Hey, Callie. Hey, Tula,” you say with a smile. “Cro’s still upstairs, doing his weird Cronus shit. Prolly tuning his guitar so he can serenade you or some shit.”

Latula snorts.

“Well, I could go the rest of my life without seeing him, so I mean..” she says. “But I brought a friend here with me. As you can see by her manner of dress, she is a princess, and should be treated as such.”

Princess Calliope. You got it. You think she’s smiling, but you can’t tell.

Callie blushes underneath all that fabric, you can ascertain that much. She raises her arms, shakily, tentatively, and you give her the tightest hug you know how to give. You’re scared she’ll disappear if you let go, like some sort of apparition.

“I can’t fucking believe you’re here,” you say against her neck, trying not to cry. 

This is the first time you’ve seen her since April, really, not counting the times you climbed the tree in her yard so you could talk to her from the branch nearest her window. Since she wasn’t going outside, you brought outside to her. Her homework assignments, which was something of a futile move, since she was homeschooled for the remainder of sixth grade. Those along with cha siu bao from Flushing. 

She couldn’t possibly tell you to get out of her tree if you had pork buns. She was still wearing bandages, then, and would partially undo them and turn away so she could eat without you seeing her face.

Her mother had a fit when she saw you in that tree, and told you to never come back. Her father countered by pointing out that Calliope could sorely use some human interaction. And so you were allowed to remain, like some kind of emo cockatoo with a purple streak in its hair. 

“You’re back. You came back,” you continue. “I can’t believe you fucking came here, oh my God.”

“Me neither,” she says. “Latula came by my house and wouldn’t exactly take no for an answer. And Papa was home, so neither would he.”

“Aren’t you happy to be outside, though?” she asks. “You can’t tell me you were happy being stuck in that room of yours all summer.”

Calliope glances around, taking in her surroundings.

“I don’t know about that,” she replies honestly, seeming nervous. “Can we go inside?”

“Sure, we can,” you say.

You lead them into your house… mansion, thing. You have them sit down in the living room, while you look for a movie to put on.

“Right, so, unless anyone has any fuckin’ objections, we’re watching Harry Potter. Again.”

You shoot Callie a grin.

Calliope gradually unwinds the fabric around her face, so she can grin back. Once it’s free, she folds it up, and deposits it on the couch next to her. 

Much of the lower and left part of her face has healed into angry scar tissue. This is the first time you’ve seen it. Sure her mouth is functional, along with most everything else, though she says she’s partially blind in her left eye now. 

Damn, did Caliborn do a number on her. You’d kill him, if you’re not secretly hoping someone does it for you. He’s in juvie or whereverthefuck. He’s an asshole. It could happen. Someone should shank him.

“I know I look bad,” Callie begins. “But would you please stop staring? Please?”

“You don’t look bad,” you half-lie, sitting down next to her. You look away from her, though.

“My hair is gone. My face is a travesty.”

That’s like, an SAT level word. You tell her that and earn a shadow of a smile.

“Your hair’s not gone.” You tug on a lock of her blonde curls, much shorter than before, but still present. “It’s just short.”

“I cut it so it would be symmetrical,” she informs you.

“That look suits you,” Latula says. “It makes you look older than the pigtails did.”

“I have trouble believing anything about this look suits me. And I’m not sure why I even went outside today.”

“To see your friends, duh,” you reply. “You can’t just live out the rest of your life in your room.”

“What if I want to?”

That’s a valid question.

“Yeah, well, I said you can’t, ‘cause the sixth Harry Potter book is coming out, and we gotta be at Barnes and Noble at midnight on the twentieth, and you gotta go back to school so you can receive Confirmation, and someone’s gotta tell Vriska to shut the fuck up, and none of us have succeeded yet.”

Calliope blinks, slowly. Then, that half-smile again. She snorts at the last thing.

“My parents have paid my tuition for seventh grade,” she says. “They seem to agree with you.”

“Long as somebody does.”

* * *

 

That night, she doesn’t go home. Or, she goes home to get her pain medication, the eye drops she uses on her bad eye, and the cream she slathers all over her burn scars, and comes right back to your house. Unfortunately, drunk Cronus is the one to let her in, current reigning monarch of the total asshole kingdom.

“Fuckin’ hell, ain’t it a little early to be wearing a Halloween mask, Cal? I don’t have any fuckin’ candy.”

Callie’s eyes well up with tears. Her hands go up, to pull at the green fabric she forgot to properly wrap around the lower half of her face before she returned to your house. You think it’d stay up a little better if Aradia had a hand in it. She’s a pro at pinning fabric into place and making it stay where it’s supposed to.

Maybe next time when you two meet up to talk History, and she sniffs and makes pointed criticisms about the way that western civilization is taught, you’ll ask her if she can help Calliope out. You like Aradia. She can go toe to toe with your assertions and suggestions, never patronizing, but always questioning. She challenges you to think.

You hope that you and she end up at the same high school, so you have someone to compete with in class.

Then, you practically materialize at Calliope’s side, to defend her from the jackass.

“Cro, do me a favor and fuck the fuck off,” you say. “Liquor cabinet’s in the other fuckin’ direction, ya drunk jerkoff.”

In response, Cronus shoves you so hard that you almost topple over an end table. You recover, and move forward to sock him right in the mouth. 

Yeah, Cro can fuck you up when he’s hammered, but you can give as good as you get.

Calliope’s expression goes momentarily blank, her eyes open but unseeing. 

You shake her to attention.

“C’mon, Callie, we’re gonna chill in my room. I promise King Dipshit won’t bother us,” you tell her, grabbing her hand, and starting to drag her up the stairs.

She recoils for a moment, and then apologizes. Oh yeah, right. She’s not one for sudden or forceful movements.

Half a minute later, she offers you her unscarred hand.

“Are we watching Harry Potter again, Eridan?” she asks, in near monotone.

“What the hell else would we watch?” you want to know.

“Lord of the Rings?” she offers. “You can’t tell me you don’t like Return of the King.”

Yeah, that’s true. It’s your favorite, out of the trilogy, mostly because everyone is even _more_ badass than they were before. Even the comic relief is badass.

Callie sits down on your bed, while you load the DVD into the player.

Now, practically everyone could (and does) misconstrue you and Calliope as being a Thing, given her propensity for staying over and sleeping right next to you in your twin sized bed. It was bigger last year, you swear it. It was even bigger, the year before that.

Certainly, Cronus makes that mistake with you and Calliope often enough. You’ve had appropriately douchey retorts to his speculation.

“Just ‘cause you spent all of middle and high school trying to get into Latula’s pants doesn’t mean we all have the same goddamn endgame,” you told him.

“Yeah, ‘cause you’re a fucking homo,” he replied.

You didn’t really have a response to that, because for all you know, Cro might be right. Sure, girls are cute, you think. There's one you met on the train, with a giant smile and a tangle of black hair that left you momentarily speechless. But you don’t want to kiss them yet, or anything.

You do sort of want to kiss Tavros, or at least wonder what it would be like to do that. He’s unfailingly affectionate with everyone (except Vriska), he’s never made fun of you, and he taught you how to play Pokemon. Once, he chased down the ice cream truck, just because you said you wanted a milkshake, looking rather pleased with himself when he succeeded.

And you almost kissed him in 132nd street park, back in January, when it was just you, he, and Calliope making snow angels. 

However, you learned long ago there are some things best kept to yourself, particularly if you attend a Catholic school.

Calliope knows, but she’s the only one. She’s the only one you’ll ever tell before high school. You two are best friends, but you’re more than best friends. Your relationship transcends the meaning of those two words.

Meanwhile, you two have the better part of a bottle of apricot brandy in here, borrowed from your parents’ liquor cabinet, and most often raided by your brother. You get the distinct impression that Cronus doesn’t care what you take, as long as you leave the whiskey and the vodka untouched.

Using lemons and seltzer you got from your fridge, and sugar Callie got from the cabinet above your sink, you’re going to be making (modified) apricot sours all night. Neither of you can really drink it without cutting it down by half with seltzer.

(In three years, you’ll be dividing it three ways - you, Calliope Calver, and Roxy Lalonde forming some kind of drunk triangle of fucked up kids. Unlike you two, Roxy won’t take her brandy diluted. More unlike you two, she won’t stop at three drinks, or anywhere near three drinks. Maybe three squared drinks, or whenever the bottle is empty.)

Tonight, though, it’s just you and Calliope in your bed. She’s resting her head on your shoulder, and you’ve got your head on hers.

Just the proximity of her is enough to make you sleepier than you’d usually be at this hour. You relax easy around her. You start to lie down, and so does she, her head poking out of the blanket so she can see the television.

One major change since she chopped half her hair off? You can’t tug on her pigtails when you want her to shift over, so she’s not making your arm fall asleep. So you poke her, a little harder than you intend, and she seems to get the idea.

She shifts, and stretches, smiling weakly back at you. You’re unsure of how she stands you, to be perfectly honest.

But this is Calliope Calver in a nutshell.

Small and birdboned, four foot ten, and a hundred pounds soaking wet, so slight that sometimes you wonder if she’s just a hallucination. A dream a lonely isolated kid made up because he needed a friend. But she’s had conversations with the other friends you’ve made, so unless you’re hallucinating all of them - especially Tavros and Aradia - she’s probably real.

For what it’s worth, you don’t think you’ve imagined Terezi. She’s too strange to be a hallucination. And Vriska’s too mean.

(What if the whole world is a hallucination, though? What if none of it is real?)

You ground yourself in the here and now by focusing on Callie’s appearance.

Her blonde hair frames her head like a halo now that it’s short. She’s got heavy-lidded eyes a color you’d never seen before you met her, like the pulp of a lime. Even now, even with her faint melancholy following her like a dog, she’s still kinetic, with bright, anxious energy. You’re surprised to note that she doesn’t have her writing notebook with her. She’s always writing something.

You have to put a hand on her leg to stop it from vibrating. She laughs.

Although you feel like you’ve known her earlier - since forever, since you had the ability to remember - your first conscious memory of her dates back to Kindergarten, with her telltale pigtails bouncing down her back as she played jump rope.

A few days later, at lunch, which your father had remembered to pack for Cronus and not you - all you got were some cheese crackers since he forgot the sandwich and the carrots - she gave you half her peanut butter and jelly sandwich, deftly peeling the crusts off before she offered it to you.

“I’m not supposed to take food from people I don’t know,” you said to her.

She nodded, like she understood. Then, she did the oddest thing, considering the fact that nobody in your class seemed to like you all that much.

Aside from being quiet and inclined to reading rather than talking, and being somewhat of a pompous jerk even then, you shoved a kid over on the first day of school for knocking over your blocks, and officially made yourself a bit of a pariah.

Calliope introduced herself to you anyway.

“I’m Calliope. Calliope Calver. Everyone calls me Callie,” she said, with a faint accent you would later learn was an English one. “And you are?”

“Eridan Ampora.” You gestured to your empty lunchbox, your name written upon it in upper-case lettering, just in case she didn’t believe you. Your name was/is odd. “It’s right there.”

“What’s your favorite animal?” she asked.

“Seahorses, I guess.”

“Really? Mine are butterflies.”

“Butterflies are nice,” you agreed.

“What’s your favorite number?” she asks.

“Uh…” You thought for a while. “Two hundred and eight, I guess.”

You pulled that number out of an orifice you couldn’t name yet.

She goggles at you.

That led to a discussion, as much of a discussion as two relatively intelligent five year olds could have, about how a thousand didn’t actually come after a hundred and ninety nine.

“I just _knew_ my brother was lying to me,” Callie said, looking somewhat betrayed.

“Your brother?” you asked.

She pointed to the kid you pushed down in September, who had black hair and reddish eyes. She said they were twins, but you thought twins were supposed to look the same. You said this to her, and she replied that they couldn’t _all_ look the same.

“What’s your favorite number?” you asked her.

She smiled.

“Three,” she said.

“That’s a cool number.” You could dig it. Three. You wonder if she made it up on the spot like you did.

She put her hand on yours.

“Now we know each other, Eridan,” she declared. “So now you can take half my sandwich, and your parents won’t be mad.”

You laugh, just thinking about it. 

God, you love her more than life.

In the present, you watch the really impulsive hobbit guy (you’re not entirely sure which one’s Pippin and which one’s Merry anymore) take Saruman’s crystal ball like he owns the damn thing, and watch it get subsequently confiscated by Gandalf. 

You would so do that. Pick up the stupid crystal ball and have someone with more brain cells take it away before you did something dumb like make eye-contact with Sauron. You say this much out loud.

“It’s called a palantír, remember?” Calliope says, more of a nerd than you could ever hope to be, and you’re the one who made a decent effort at learning Quenya in fifth grade.

Callie’s not one to say things just to screw with you, so you figure she must be right.

You repeat the word.


End file.
